SEO or search engine optimization can help your customers find you. Everyone is online now (more than likely watching way too much Netflix and eating way too many snacks) so it is time to make sure you are accessible. There are new ways to do that every day with SEO.
Over the next few months, we understand that marketing dollars, or any dollars, may be difficult to come by in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. How do you decide where to put those marketing dollars? It might be a good idea to shift some funds over to SEO. SEO known as search engine optimization is more important than ever right now because your customers are glued to the internet. Read on to learn specific ways SEO can help.
SEO is a lot more than you may realize. It is a variety of elements put together to help search engines more easily find your website and read it correctly. If search engines cannot find you, then odds are your customers will have a hard time as well.
Start refining your SEO strategy by narrowing down your audience. If you know your audience, you know where to find them. If you don’t have analytics set up, now is a great time to learn more about your customers and really define your target audience. This information can change your entire marketing strategy.
Next, you want to look for any major issues with your website that would prevent Google or Bing or any other search engine from indexing your site. These issues could be broken links, duplicate content, speed issues, a crawl error with the search engine and much more.
You say your website functions fine? How do you take it to the next level with SEO?
Why do you need to change your SEO strategy going forward? How would SEO play a role in COVID-19 recovery? Search Engine Journal and Milestone describe a crisis recovery plan in 3 sections: crisis, recovery and growth. Any implementations of these phases will help you to create a base of customers to build on during the growth phase and beyond.
During the crisis phase, many businesses were scrambling to change their whole business model. Businesses had to listen to their customers and offer what they could--constantly adapting. During this phase, the digital world is the easiest way to get information out to customers. This activity requires a lot of real time updates to your website, Google My Business, social media and more. The key is adapting to the new normal.
The recovery phase is where we are now. As SEJ says, we are “working in the new normal” and learning how to do just that. This is where the research into your target audience will be handy. Find your tribe and advertise directly to them with an enticing offer. Maybe “an offer they can’t refuse??” Please note the unnecessary Godfather quote.
Google continually updates is algorithms to help filter better results for its users. The changes to Google are why we want to prioritize these 3 things. Google is focusing on matching the intent of the searcher with concise content. The most recent updates to Google like BERT and Hummingbird are based on the intent of the user. Searches are executed more in a question and answer format. FAQ pages are a HUGE opportunity here. These are easy to create and don’t require a ton of programming, unless you want to get fancy. If you want to learn about all the changes to search, there is a great article from MOZ that breaks them all down from year 2000 to now.
When you optimize for BERT and Hummingbird you are naturally optimizing for voice search. However, there are a lot of things to take into consideration. One of the most important things is doing the research on what people are searching for. Google Search Console is a great place to start with that but there are several tools that you (and McD Digital) can use.
According to new research, Schema markup is critical. This can also be called structured data or microdata. They are coded a bit differently, but they are all intended to help the search engine understand your site and your company. The knowledge panel on the right-hand side when you do a Google search is filled out by reading this information. The goal of all of this is to get the correct information to the user based on their search—matching the intent to quality content.
There are new ways to use Schema every day including a way to tell Google about updates for COVID-19. The new code is designed for the healthcare industry to give people the most up-to-date information on the pandemic and changes at hospitals.
We are all learning to work in the “new normal.” Your business should be adapting. We talked about only a few ways SEO can help by using FAQ pages, voice search optimization and Schema or structured data. These are 3 out of hundreds, if not thousands, of ways to optimize your website. There are a lot of tools out there that can help but it is most certainly overwhelming.
The best place to start is an assessment of your current website and McD Digital can help with a FREE Website SEO Audit.
Take your brand to the next level with McD Digital, contact Randy McDaniels, rmcdaniels@mcdmarketing.com or 309-346-7412.
